The restaurant business is full of concepts that have gone stale.  Mindful of their sizeable investment (a sunk cost!), many restaurants attempt to enhance or revive their tired platforms with mixed success.  Rarer, but more important and much riskier, is the “relevance reset” – something big, announced with great PR fanfare and paid media – that says to the customer: “Hey, I know I was irrelevant to you in the past… but look again!”

We first heard the term “relevance reset” in a Pizza Hut presentation to investors earlier this year.  Executives described their $10 Any Pizza effort as “not a traditional [marketing] window.  It is a relevance reset” (complete with a graphic of a giant reset button).  Since then, we’ve been looking at the industry with this concept in mind.  When new ideas are launched, are they game changing, like $5 Footlong or Domino’s new pizza campaign?  Or, are they possibly-helpful-but-not-game-changing tactics, like Fire-Grilled Ribs at Burger King or IHOP’s lower-calorie Simple & Fit menu (all of which may be fine, but won’t make a stale concept fresh again)?

The best brands are prescient enough to reset their business before they become stale.  McDonald’s reset its (already successful) breakfast business with McCafé and quickly demonstrated that they can do better with lattes than Starbucks can do with Egg McMuffins.

Of course, not all attempts have been successful – think KFC’s Grilled Chicken or Pizza Hut’s rebranding as “The Hut.” Unsuccessful attempts not only fail to boost comps, but also divert the organization from execution of the core offering and disrupt relationships with franchisees.

Recently, the “relevance reset” has largely focused on value.  Restaurants have responded to consumers’ economic struggles by lowering prices they raised before the recession due to commodity inflation.  What began as a trickle of offers has turned into a cascade of discounts fundamentally altering perceptions of value in the industry.  Some of the resets have panned out, but most came off as also-rans.

Beyond value, other forms of relevance reset are coming:

• Core Product Reset:  If Domino’s can pull it off successfully, others will try.  If they fail, it could be spectacular
• Menu Reset:  It may be time to trim the bloated menu that has strayed from the original concept (e.g., how many places can you buy tacos today?  In how many of those locations are tacos actually concept-relevant?)

Restaurants would do well to think about when and how they should reset their brand before it becomes tired.  But how do you ensure a relevance reset will be successful?  Due to the inherent scope of such projects, testing is critical to optimize resets—helping restaurants to identify the elements of a program that will drive profits.

As the former President of Subway Franchise Advertising Trust Fund said:

“Some people think Test & Learn is a lot of nerdy analysis.  I think just the opposite – Test and Learn helps us to be maximally creative and risk taking.”